Miracle rejected by the FDA

Miracle fruit is a fruit that contains the protein miraculin which can disable your sour taste buds. In effect, for about an hour after you consume a miracle fruit or a miracle fruit pill, sour fruits such as lime or lemon will taste deliciously sweet and beer will taste like coke. Vivian and Paul brought back some of this crazy stuff from Taiwan for us to try and it worked wonderfully. Although this fruit, which has proven not to have any health related drawbacks, would make a great business idea, in fact one company wanted to market this as an sugar alternative, the FDA responded with a resounding no claiming safety issues because of mysteries behind how miraculin worked. We think the multi-billion dollar sugar industry that lobbied against it may have something to do with the miracle fruit's ultimate demise. Oh well... next time you're in Taiwan or wherever else that sells this stuff, bring back some for me!

Failed Protest

George Bush came to Cisco Systems today for a visit with with some business leaders and our Governator. As curious citizens we decided to take a short walk from Altera to Cisco in anticipation of a brief glance at the motorcade or if not that then just hang with the protestors. At first we thought the protests were located at the corner of 1st and Tasman, but there wasn't anybody there. The cops there pointed us to where he thought the people might be. We gullibly believed him. Everytime we got within like a mile of the building where Bush was going to be, we were turned away by stern faces. After walking for almost an hour with several other want-to-be protestors, we gave up and went back to work. Was the rally really that unorganized or is our freedom just perceived and not actually possessed?

My Life, Angels and Demons

I started reading this book when Bill Clinton went on a book tour promoting his memoir two years ago. Spanning 1000 pages with small font, My Life was dense and long. As I got deeper into the autobiography, I felt like I was inundated in inconsequential information so I stopped reading about half way through. Now, since my commute is about 30 minutes with traffic, I decided to hear Bill Clinton's own narration of the abridged version. The book went fast (only 6 CD's), and I was able to learn quite a bit from our ex-president without mindlessly turning pages. He recalled his experiences with grace and lucidity, and I was particularly surprised how eloquently he went over the whole Monica Lewinski "scandal." As an average person without the capability to remember thousands of pages of facts, I liked this version much better. A necessary read for every progressive without the patience of an historian.


Angels and Demons is Dan Brown's prequel to his worldwide bestseller The Da Vinci Code. In this adventure, the protagonist Robert Landon traverse through Vatican City and Rome to save the Catholic Church. The book started relatively slowly, up to about halfway through the book, not much happened other than the establishment of the history of the characters, CERN, the Illuminati, and the Vatican. But as the killings started, the story got more exciting, and the ending provided several exciting twists for the mystery lovers out there. Overall entertaining, the plot toward the end was as implausible as any 007 movie. Although not as popular as The Da Vinci Code, the styles were very similar. If you like any of Dan Brown's other works, you'll like this one.

Networking and the Campanile

While searching across Berkeley campus for the elusive Alumni House before a networking seminar, I captured the Sather Tower (the campanile) reciting the Cal motto "let there be light" with literalness. Inspired, I entered the cozy forum ready to be enlightened by networking tips from a career consultant. At the end of the session, my lofty expectations came away unfulfilled. The guy did nothing but made a formal presentation of common sense. "Keep in touch with as many people as you can." "Work your contacts so they will have an interest in your success." "Offer as much as you take." All good advice, but nothing particularly illuminating.

China Rises

"China Rises" is a four part documentary originally aired on CBC and the Discovery NY Times Channel. I was able to catch it this weekend via bittorrent on-demand services. Definitely one of the more informative and impartial programs done on modern China, the series explores issues such as uneven wealth distribution, the environment, and other social conflicts surrounding the country. Predictably, the series offer interviews with the beneficiaries of the modernization juxtaposed with those of the less fortunate. The journalists from NY Times, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and several other networks from Europe offered a broad overview of China targeted to inform those away from the middle kingdom. There weren't any deep analyses of the problems, which I didn't like, but nor was there any reflexive finger pointing at the CCP, which I did like. Overall, the filmmakers kept me entertained with lines like "while the Communist Party calls it socialism with a Chinese twist, the rest of the world calls it capitalism." Of course as with any western depiction of China, there was still a negative bias. For example, the film interviewed several people in Shanghai who were "unfairly forced" to move from their decrepit rooms into modern apartments, but it failed to mention others, like many people I personally know, who desperately prays developers would take over their dilapidated residences in exchange for equal square footage at a modern high rise. For me, the images of my beloved city Shanghai and the portrayal of the lifestyles of the Chinese yuppies was nostalgic and ethereal. I couldn't help but think I could have been or perhaps should have been one of them.

Spring at Durham Greens

Notwithstanding the endless record-setting rain that fell upon us in the past month, Durham Greens Apartments is blossoming with colors of the spring. The above is taken from a peach tree just outside of my flat. Pretty.

del.icio.us

I was intrigued by the funky URL, but the site actually turned out to be a very useful web tool. While I originally signed up to make my bookmarks portable, I found many features that make del.icio.us worth the setup time. You can categorize by tags, share links with friends, and check out what other people are tagging in your favorite category. The Firefox/IE extention buttons also makes it as easy to use as your browser bookmarks.

Find my bookmarks here. http://del.icio.us/keymaster. If you already have an account, feel free to share it with me.

Print to PDF

I hate the bulk and the maintenance of a printer, so I haven't had a printer at home for a quite a while. Recently, I discovered a new software that can make my life sans a printer much easier. PrimoPDF is free software I found on download.com that lets you print to PDF files. It works easily and smoothly. So instead of installing TaxCut at work to print my tax return, I can now bring the pdf to work, and instead of copying down driving directions by hand, I can now copy the pdf output to my pda.

Karl Qi Ambigram

Ambigrams are words written in an art form such that if it's read upside down it still spells the same word. In Angles and Demons, Dan Brown suggested that this is a difficult task. Always a sucker for challenges, I decided to make an ambigram out of my name. The above image is the fruit of my 10 minutes of labor, as you can see, upside down it still spells KARLQI. Perhaps my name is especially easy....

Monkey Business and the Da Vinci Code

My thoughts on two of the books I recently read.

I started reading this straightforward, funny, and vulgar account of life as an investment banker just because it was conveniently laying around the apartment, but it turned out to be an entertaining read. Enjoy learning about the misery of others? Want justification why the big shots on wall street were paid exorbitant amounts of money? Need insights on how to get the big payday straight out of B school? Then this book is for you. After a quick read, you will get the answers to all those questions and much much more. Warning: if you're an aspiring banker, the visceral dose of reality will probably make you reconsider.


"World best seller", "griping thriller", after hearing all the accolades, I had to read this. The Milpitas library generously provided me with 13 CD's worth of listening fun to supplement my otherwise mundane daily commute, and I delved in to the action packed novel. Surprisingly, I wasn't as intrigued by the action as I thought I would be. But as I got deeper and deeper into the book, Dan Brown piqued my interests with stories of Jesus and the Bible, etymology of many Christian terms, and biography of numerous historical figures. By the later chapters, I couldn't wait for the narrator and actually finished book with the print version. The book was meticulously researched, carefully plotted, and stimulatingly relevant. However, the romance in the novel was poorly and cheesily portrayed and the voice of the French women Sophie Neveu should not have been read by an American man.